Free Too Darn Hot by Pamela Burford Page A

that stuff anymore.”
    She joined him on the large towel, facing him cross-legged, and accepted the half sandwich he offered. “Chef Reid’s secret ingredient revealed at last.” She turned it this way and that, sniffed it, and took a tentative bite. It was delicious. “Takes me back to my youth.”
    He said, “When you have kids, you rediscover the damnedest things.” His gaze lit on her mouth. She stopped chewing. He reached across and scooped a bit of fluff from the corner of her mouth with his index finger. He touched it to her lips, and she opened them.
    The stuff stuck to his skin like glue. Lina would have liked nothing better than to take his fingertip into her mouth and suck it clean. Opting for a more dignified approach, she nibbled ineffectively at it. His skin tasted better than the marshmallow.
    Eric appeared amused as he examined the inadequate results of her efforts. He finished the job, licking his finger clean. When he dropped his hand, her eyes remained riveted on the faint scar on his bottom lip. At last she raised her eyes to his. Say something, she commanded herself.
    “How did you get the scar?”
    He touched the tip of his tongue to the vertical line on one side of his bottom lip. “A bike accident. On my tenth birthday.”
    “Ouch. Happy birthday.”
    “It could’ve been worse. I was lucky. Got skinned up pretty bad, though. Nothing serious, but I looked like hell and scared the bejesus out of my folks.”
    In the unforgiving sunlight and so close to him, she could see every crease in the spray of little lines that framed his eyes. She liked those creases.
    He chucked the last bit of his sandwich across the sand, where a gull quickly pounced on it, and leapt to his feet. “Let’s go for a swim.”
    Lina followed Eric’s lead and fed the last of her Fluffernutter to the voracious birds. “Aren’t you supposed to wait a half hour after eating?” She let him pull her to her feet. “Won’t our guts twist up or something?”
    “What can I tell you? I like to live dangerously. Good thing you wore a suit.”
    He was staring at her white T-shirt, where the outline of her bikini top was clearly visible. He raised his eyes to her face and grinned shamelessly.
    “Okay, but if I turn into shark bait—” she pulled off the shirt “—I’m dragging you down with me.”
    “Fair enough.”
    She felt his eyes on her as she dropped her cutoffs to the towel. It was the first time she’d worn the bandanna-printed red and white bikini. With its ultra-high-cut legs, it showed more of her bottom than she was accustomed to displaying.
    “Isn’t the water cold this early in the season?” she asked as they strode toward the ocean. When her toes encountered the wet sand, she scuttled back. Yikes!
    “Don’t think cold,” he said. “Think bracing. Invigorating.”
    “Right.”
    “Last one in—”
    She didn’t wait for him to finish, but barreled into the ocean at full speed. The shock of the freezing water nearly unbalanced her. Sheer momentum—and pride—kept her legs moving even as the “bracing” cold squeezed a howl of outrage from her lungs. Not one to back down from a challenge, she set her sights on the wave cresting a few yards away and dived headlong into the curl of water.
    In that moment she knew they were all wrong about hell.
    Hell is cold.
    *
    Eric surfaced near Lina, gasping for breath. Okay, he thought, so perhaps “bracing” didn’t quite cover it. “Startling,” maybe. “Coronary-inducing” was probably closer to the truth.
    His arms and legs churned the water, more to generate heat than to keep him afloat.
    Huff, huff, huff.
    He looked at Lina, huff-huffing nearby. God but she looked cute with her short, dark hair wet and clinging to her head. She was grinning widely. Then again, perhaps that was a rictus of agony.
    Their bit of ocean surged, like an ice-cold living thing, lifting them, pulling them shoreward like rag dolls as a wave cartwheeled onto the sand. The